The Unrealistic Argument

for having women in leadership

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

The Argument: “While having women in leadership is a nice idea, it’s rather naive and idealistic. It doesn’t take into account the competitive nature of men, the manipulative tendencies of women, our highly sexualized culture, or our congregation’s deep-rooted traditional views. There are just too many obstacles to having women in church leadership. It’s unrealistic.”

Counterargument 1: Things that are idealistic and thus unrealistic are usually rarely achieved or are non-existent in real life. However, our culture already sees men and women leading together in various forms in and out of churches. Thus, it seems inaccurate to call the inclusion of women in leadership idealistic or unrealistic. However, it is unrealistic to expect a big change like this to be quick, smooth, or without incident.

Counterargument 2: This argument treats the difficulties of having women and men together in leadership as if there were no feasible solutions. However, there must be feasible solutions if various secular and non-secular groups already have men and women leading together. The question is would those solutions work in this situation?

Counterargument 3: This argument treats the difficulties that may arise from having women in leadership as if they would be greater than the difficulties already present with men-only leaders. New problems usually seem more frightening than old problems, but that is because solutions have yet to be found, not because solutions don’t exist.

Counterargument 4: This argument invalidates the end goal based on the difficulties of achieving that goal, however, it does not state whether that goal is worth having or not. By such reasoning, one might also say, “Since it is very hard to remodel our house, we should not do it.” The question is, does the house need remodeling?

If you would like to read more arguments and counterarguments like this, click on the links below: